Tom Bissell quotes:

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  • I'm an Old Media guy. I don't have a website; I don't Twitter. I love magazines, yet I love video games. It's a strange disconnect.

  • I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.

  • Only in about 2007 or so did it become clear to me that games could stand proudly beside other storytelling mediums, and that's when I became more, shall we say, evangelistic in my position. Prior to that, I don't know how enthusiastically I would have admitted that I game.

  • Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers.

  • Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to articulate.

  • All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience.

  • I like reading books with both hands, with my heart pumping, with blood on the page. So I'm interested in people who make stuff, and I'm interested in the lives that make the text. To read a book or watch a movie any other way, to me, personally, feels like a waste of time and misapplication of energy.

  • Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling.

  • Fun is not the same thing as fulfillment.

  • The underwater businessman philosopher Andrew Ryan was BioShock's unforgettable villain.

  • A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

  • Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game.

  • Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.

  • All the stuff I love most in game storytelling is never the big-picture stuff; it's the stuff that feels like curlicues, stuff that's just there because it's a game and because you can do it.

  • For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.

  • My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

  • The average action game doesn't much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.

  • I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

  • Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.

  • Of that time, there is still much we do not know.

  • An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.

  • Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.

  • Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.

  • Here's what I just realized: A world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn't deserve any art.

  • [M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life-the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes-ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases.

  • Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer-so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.

  • To create anythingâ?¦ is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.

  • We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.

  • When I play too many video games I begin to feel chubby-minded, caffeinated, bad.

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